Cemetery Road

“Don’t argue with me.”

I look around the workshop, my gaze moving across the instruments. They’re so different from one another. Buck loved to learn about new woods, and he did that by working with them. In this small space I see macassar ebony, East Indian rosewood, American swamp ash, koa, quilted maple, bird’s-eye maple, figured sapele, Sitka spruce, pau ferro. The variation in design shapes equals the selection of woods. Buck built parlor guitars, concert models, dreadnoughts—

“I know which one you want,” Quinn says. “Take it down.”

She’s talking about Buck’s personal guitar, a baritone acoustic fashioned out of one-of-a-kind padauk, a reddish wood so rare it was harvested after a monsoon laid a whole stand low on the Andaman islands in the Bay of Bengal. Set into the ebony fret board is a beautiful B.F. logo in mother-of-pearl.

“I can’t take that, Quinn. That guitar’s worth more than any two of the others. Ten thousand, at least.”

“I’ll sleep better knowing you have it.”

“Let me pay you for it.”

“Don’t insult me. I’ll get the case.”

While she retrieves the hard-shell case from another room, I take down the baritone, put it on my knee, and pick out a haunting fingerstyle instrumental that Buck wrote when I was in high school.

“That’s why it’s your guitar,” she says. “Nobody else even knows that song. Just you and me.”

The notes of Buck’s song hang almost visibly in the air of his workshop, then die to make way for those that follow. When I finish playing, and the room is silent again, Quinn helps me pack the guitar into the case. After a last look around the shop, she walks me to the front door. The baritone is heavy, but it feels right in my hand, and the chisels in my other hand help balance the weight.

As we face each other across the threshold, Quinn says, “It’s wrong to kill a man for trying to do what’s right. The past matters, you know? Even if people don’t realize it. You’d think Southerners would get that.”

“Mississippians are pretty selective about what they like to remember.”

She laughs bitterly. “You say ‘they’ like you’re not one of them.”

“I left a long time ago, Quinn.”

“Most people from here, that doesn’t make any difference.”

“It did to me.”

“Promise me you’ll find out who killed him?”

I look back into her expectant eyes. Moments like this one have consequences. “I will. I won’t rest until I do.”

“And then what?”

I turn up my palms. “Get justice.”

“What does that look like, you think?”

“I can’t bring him back, Quinn.”

She tries to force a smile, but the result is an awful grimace. She reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. “Watch your back, okay? These fuckers are serious.”

“I know. You, too.”

She gives me a light kiss on the cheek, then turns away.

As I walk toward the Flex, the screen door slaps shut behind me, the main door closes, and I hear the bolt shoot home. Quinn doesn’t stand around waiting to smile and wave as I drive off, which is the Southern way. She feels more allegiance to her dead husband than to pointless folkways. Yet the guitar in my hand tells me she’s already begun the necessary process of letting him go. She will treasure Buck’s memory and avenge him if she can, but Quinn is a survivor.

And life is for the living.

I’M BACK ON THE Little Trace, headed west, when the coroner calls my cell phone. The dozen shades of green in the thick canopy give me the feeling of driving through a rain forest. I take the call on the Flex’s Bluetooth system.

“Hey, Byron. Thanks for getting back to me. What can you tell me?”

The coroner’s deep bass voice rattles the door speakers. “I only got a minute. And I feel a little funny about this.”

“I imagine you’re feeling some pressure down there. Certain influential people want this to go down as an accident?”

“You know it.” He lets out a cross between a sigh and a groan. “But between you and me … Buck was murdered.”